


The Sweet River Water

by bomberqueen17



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Alcohol, Cunnilingus, F/M, Post-Canon, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 06:36:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17699462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: I just wanted to spend a little more time with these characters. So it's just Sarkan's POV at the end of the novel.





	The Sweet River Water

 

I’d assumed I was more or less immune to self-delusion, but then I’d also thought I was inured to the court of public opinion. I also hadn’t really realized how much of myself I had bound up in my single-minded long-term doomed last stand against the Wood. I’d rather thought I’d welcome a change, but I felt adrift, in the capital. Nothing was important, everyone irritated me. 

It wasn’t that there wasn’t work to do there. I nearly died, uncovering corruption and various other magical traps that had been left in the chaos of Kralia. The longing for the Spindle, from drinking that accursed water, was a constant drain on me, but I got used to it, and I got used to the way people looked at me there, and I reconfirmed that I was far and away the most powerful wizard in the country, even as Alosha recovered-- her magic was powerful, but specialized, and her reflexes weren’t any match for mine. As I found out when a trapped old spell in a boar-pike almost killed me.

What I didn’t really get used to was pining like a lovelorn teenager over Agnieszka, which was embarrassing and absolutely contrary to all the things I believed about myself. It was painful, it was tedious, it was adolescent, it was utterly unlike any version of myself that I had ever believed in. 

Alosha caught me forlornly making myself little rose illusions for myself, when we were both cooped up in the Willow’s infirmary after my extremely intimate encounter with the cursed boar-pike. It was humiliating to be so seen, and she could have been much less kind about it, but told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to get ahold of myself. Which was hardly fair, as I had made no mistakes in any professional capacity, but she was right, it wasn’t a good way for a man of over a century in age to be spending his time.

And yet. I deluded myself that I was simply returning to the tower out of duty, and to sort out the taxes, and to effect repairs. I had discussed it with the Regent, when the royal family came back into residence, and I had intended to tell him that Agnieszka should probably take over the stewardship of the region, but somehow I had found myself explaining that I’d left too much undone and had to return myself to see it all through. 

He’d as much as said that I should do whatever pleased me most; he had a list of potions he needed me to brew, and other things that required my attention but not that I be in any particular place. 

But of course Kasia returned with the royal family, and she came to me with a packet of things she expected me to deliver to Agnieszka for her. When I told her I hadn’t had any correspondence with her friend, she seemed shocked, and went away with nothing more to say to me. 

I kept up my delusion even after I’d been to Olshanka, to see to the collection of the tax tributes. I had to continue on to Dvernik, because of course I had to deliver the packet Kasia had left with me. No more.

I transported myself there, set the packet down on the table, and watched for a moment. No one had seen me arrive, and so I could watch the way they behaved unaltered. I had never been particularly enamored of peasants, had never entertained the foolish romantic notions courtiers sometimes held about their purity and simplicity, but there was something lovely about the scene, everyone all together around the bonfire, playing music and laughing and drinking. 

And there was Agnieszka, among them as though she were still just one of them and nothing more. She was sitting on the ground, her skirts hiked up to her knees, legs and feet bare and filthy, and her mother was combing her hair for her. She was gazing into the fire, and smiling a little; she was happy. 

She had never been beautiful, as such, but this was as sweet a depiction of her charms as any: she was strong-featured, with a lovely round face and strong cheekbones, and the flames’ flickering light traced the edges of her features with a warm glow. 

And she belonged here; she was  _ of _ here, she was as much a creature of this land as anything the Wood had ever made. How had I ever dared to remove her? 

I should go, now, I realized; I should vanish as I’d come, before she saw me, and leave the packet from Kasia, which had her name written on it, and I was about to turn to go when the village headwoman saw me, stood up and put down her cup and addressed me, and everyone fell silent and looked at me, all at once. 

I had to fight the urge to vanish-- I wavered, thinking that it wasn’t too late, I could just-- but then Agnieszka got to her feet, licking her fingers-- she’d been eating something, a piece of fruit, and I realized what it was and couldn’t help myself.

“That’s  _ appalling _ ,” I said. It was the fruit from a heart-tree, which had featured in more than one of my nightmares, and she was just-- eating it, like it was something perfectly harmless. 

She came toward me. “They’re all coming ripe,” she said, delighted with herself, I could tell. She seemed to enjoy getting a rise out of me, and this certainly was. 

I muttered something horrified about being turned into a tree, which amused her even more. Despite everything, she seemed pleased to see me, and it was then that I shed the last of my delusions: of course I had come here for her, of course I would stay as long as she let me, and I would do whatever she said, and that was that.

She took me by the arm and brought me over to where she’d been sitting, saying I should meet her parents. I had met them before, of course, but it seemed awkward to bring it up. Though it was awkward regardless. She made me sit down on the bench next to them, and someone brought me a cup of beer.

“We have met before, though, Nieschka,” her mother said, ruthless, and I steeled myself and agreed, as pleasantly as I could manage.

“When?” Agnieszka asked, startled. 

Her mother looked at me, tilting her head. “You appeared abruptly, demanding evidence that our daughter was our daughter. I had to dig a worn-out knitted bunny out of the rag basket.”

Agnieszka laughed suddenly. “I had forgotten about that,” she said. “When you became convinced I was a spy.”

“In hindsight,” I said drily, “knowing what I know now, it makes a great deal more sense, but consider my point of view, which was that this girl I had discovered with the tinest apparent thread of magical ability was suddenly in the midst of casting the most complex spell I had to hand, by herself, with no prompting. It was not hard to draw the conclusion I did, which was that you were some sort of spy or a trap sent by an enemy.”

“We did find it a bit worrying,” her father said, and went on, addressing his daughter. “We had expected you might not be all a lord could hope for, as a servant, but we had not expected that one.”

Something that had niggled at my awareness reasserted itself, and I said, “Forgive me, but did you genuinely have no notion that she had any magical ability at all?” 

The parents exchanged a look, and Agnieszka was shaking her head. “We suspected,” the mother said, “something, but-- not anything definite. Not like that. She just… was good at finding things, and little things like that.”

“Is that not usual?” the father asked. “That she-- that no one suspected?”

I considered it. “I don’t know, honestly,” I said. “Potential wizards and witches are normally discovered as children. It doesn’t say much for my abilities that I didn’t spot her before that.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” the mother said, quiet but fierce. 

I glanced at her in startlement. “No?”

She flinched a little at my regard, and I mentally reviewed my tone, which had possibly been too sharp. But she collected her courage, and continued quietly, “She would not have come back to us, if you had taken her any younger.”

Agnieszka made a noise of protest, and I put my hand on her arm, quieting her. “No, she’s right,” I said. We had an audience, I was painfully aware, but it seemed a good time to say this. “I didn’t know--” But I had to start farther back than that. “So, the girls. I demanded a local girl to come and serve me in part because all of you have a strong connection to the land, here. The water-- Agnieszka knows about it. The river is a conduit for power, and all of you have some of it in your blood, from living here and drinking the water. I could use that, without doing any harm to the girls at all, to increase our defenses against the Wood.” I glanced over at her. “You’ve explained this, yes?”

She shook her head, amused. “I didn’t figure it was my place to explain it,” she said.

A fair point, but annoying. “Of course,” I said. 

“You don’t owe us an explanation,” the headwoman said, a bit severely, and I realized she was chastising Agnieszka. 

“No, I do,” I said, aware that I sounded cranky, and helpless to do anything about it. “I do. I should have-- it’s just hard to explain, and there was never time. But now that it’s over-- well. I should conclude-- the effect wears away over time, of the power the water holds, and so the girls no longer had that connection anymore after ten years, which was one of the reasons I needed to replace them. I had never realized that they wouldn’t ever stay here afterward. I thought I was releasing them to return to their families, and I didn’t understand that not a one of them would stay here once the connection was gone.” 

Slyly, cannily, seemingly-innocently, Agnieszka said, “Why girls?”

It was an opportunity to defend myself, I understood, but my face got a little hot-- to think firstly that all these people assumed I’d been serially raping their daughters, and then the memory of Agnieszka, naked, in my bed, flashed behind my eyes, and I had to take a deep breath. “I didn’t think about how it would look,” I admitted, unable to hide my distress. “I just knew that girls would give less trouble than boys, and would generally know how to occupy themselves without causing problems.” 

“No one is accusing you--” the headwoman said, giving Agnieszka an annoyed glare. It was interesting, I thought; I’d assumed they were all afraid of me because I was a wizard, but nobody seemed frightened at all of Agnieszka, and surely they had seen her work magic. 

What that said about me wasn’t very complimentary.

I held up my hand. “Of course they are,” I said. “If the girls never came home again-- I can’t blame anyone for assuming.” I shook my head. “Anyway, I don’t-- there’s no power in the Wood to fight, I don’t need to-- I wouldn’t anyway, now that I know, but--” 

The headwoman tried to break in, with something reassuring, and I laughed and held up my hand again. “You don’t have to defend me,” I said. 

“We’re aware we could have it worse,” Agnieszka’s father said wryly. They’d all had rather a lot of beer, which tended to give rise to a great deal more honesty than one would normally expect.

I, on the other hand, had not consumed actual beer in longer than I could remember. I still had the cup in my hand, and I contemplated it for a moment. “Could be better, though,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do. Without the Wood-- I don’t know how much longer the Regent will leave me here. Long enough to repair the tower, at least. I’ll do my best.”

“I’ll drink to that,” the father said, and I laughed despite myself, and drank, and discovered that beer wasn’t objectionable to my palate after all. There was vodka as well, which I had only seldom indulged in before. It was not enough to get me to dance, and anyway most of the dancing was already done, for the evening. 

But I did wind up enjoying myself a great deal more than I had expected. Everyone was drunk enough not to consistently remember I was there, which meant they mostly left me alone and I could just observe, without being stared at or remarked upon or fussed at. Agnieszka was up and about quite a lot, but I sat in one place on the bench, and mostly nobody paid me much mind. The headwoman sat with me for a few moments, and I was still sober enough to speak solemnly with her a little while about the state of things-- she knew more about the politics in the capital than I had expected, but surely she was no fool-- but after some time, everyone began to wander off and the fire began to die down, and Agnieszka came and sat back down next to me.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” she said, and refilled my cup from the pitcher she’d brought with her. 

“I don’t need more of that,” I said, objecting too late.

“It’d be a shame to waste it,” she said sweetly. 

“Of course,” I said, and took a drink of it. It went down very easily, now, which was probably a bad sign. 

“Thank you for bringing the packet from Kasia,” she said. “Did you speak to her much? Did she seem all right?”

I let my breath out slowly. “I did not speak to her very much,” I admitted. “She asked after you and when I said I didn’t know, she, well, she went away without saying very much more to me.”

“Oh dear,” Agnieszka said. 

I shrugged one shoulder. “I should have written, but I didn’t know what to say.”

She pressed her shoulder against mine. “You’re here now,” she said. 

I smiled, at that, but didn’t turn my head; I would want to kiss her, and that wasn’t mine to presume. And after insisting I never touched the girls, to kiss one of them in front of everyone-- well, I still didn’t know what she wanted, and it seemed like a bad idea. But I wanted very badly to kiss her, or at least put my arm around her.

Instead I raised a hand and carefully, delicately, constructed a little illusion, of a rose. “I tried to figure out how you reached me,” I said, “that time when you were in the capital, and I was here. I never really asked, but I could see the rose illusion when I saw you, and I thought you must have hung it off the framework of that spell, whatever it was you did.” I built the illusion up a little more, gave it a few more blooms, let one of the blooms shed a few petals. It was a pointless extravagance, but there was no fight to hoard magic for-- not right now, anyway. And I was a little bit drunk, I was realizing, and I’d never done magic drunk before. Well, not since I was literally a teenager, and not much then. That might have been the last time I’d had beer, now that I considered it. 

“I did,” she said. She frowned. “How hard did you try?”

“Not very,” I admitted. “The one time I really wanted to make it work, I wasn’t in any shape to give it the power it needed.”

She put her hand out, but instead of touching me, or adding her magic to mine, she just made a little bee, like the ones I’d made before. The bee came over and landed on the rose, and set to work. I felt her magic touching mine, but she carefully didn’t let it twine into mine, or connect at all. “In any shape,” she said. “Were you sick?”

“Injured,” I said. “There were some pretty serious traps, and some bad corruption, and I didn’t have much help.” I frowned, and constructed another bee. “I didn’t run away just to run away, you know.”

“I wasn’t sure,” she said. She made another bee. “I’ll show you sometime, how I made the spell work, but I don’t know how to show it to you when you’re nearby. I’m sure I can remember how I did it.” She had turned her head, and was looking at me. “You only wanted to talk to me when you were injured?”

“No,” I admitted, “but I only tried then. Well, and a second time, but Alosha interrupted me.”

“Is she all right?” Agnieszka asked.

“Getting better,” I said. I yanked on the illusion, and collapsed it in on itself neatly, catching it so it wouldn’t unspool and folding it back into myself. Agnieszka’s bees buzzed around in confusion for a moment before she pulled them gently apart and wound them back into herself. I turned, then, and looked at her, and it was extremely difficult not to reach for her. “Come back to the tower with me,” I said. 

“I have work to do here,” she said, and her expression was flat, maybe a little wary. 

“I don’t mean-- to stay,” I said. “I mean-- I want to talk to you. That’s all.”

“Is it?” she asked, tilting her head a little. It took a lot of self-discipline not to lean in. I looked at her mouth, which was a problem, and then dragged my gaze back up to her eyes. 

“No,” I admitted. “I mean. Yes. I mean.”

“Come back to my cabin,” she said. “You can sleep off the beer and then I’ll show you what I’ve been doing. Then if you need my help with your tower, we can talk about that in daylight. I’m not going back there in the dark.”

“Cabin,” I said. I’d assumed she was living with her parents. 

“Cabin,” she said. She stood up, and held out a hand to me. I finished the beer in my cup, put it down, and put my hand into hers, letting her pull me to my feet. Her hand was cool and her grip was strong, and I wanted to pull her against myself, but there were still people around. 

I would have let go of her hand, but she hung on as she collected a bag of her belongings and picked up the basket she’d been sitting next to before, and pulled me across the green, past the bonfire. She called out good-night greetings to a couple of people, and I gave up on freeing my hand from hers. “Now,” she said, “it’s not far, but it’s far enough that I use one of Jaga’s charms to quicken feet, so I can get there fast. I haven’t done it with another person, but I’m sure we can figure it out.”

“Not fa-- it’s not in the village?” I said, astonished. 

“No,” she said, “of course not,” as if that were a mad thing for me to have suggested. “It’s in the Wood.”

I paused, and she tugged me onward, and if I hadn’t been tipsy-- I was, I was quite tipsy, it turned out, now that I was up and moving-- I would have planted my feet and refused to continue. “You’re a madwoman,” I said.

“You were there,” she said. “You know what happened.”

“I know there’s still an enormous amount of danger in that Wood,” I said. 

“And I know where most of it is, by now,” she said. “You’re quite safe, if you listen to what I say.”

“I’ve been dealing with this place for a hundred years,” I said, but it came out a little forlornly. She was tugging me down the road. “I know--”

“It’s changed, a bit,” she said. “Now!” She made a gesture with her free hand, having slung her bag over her shoulder and tucked the basket against her side, and murmured some word. I caught the edge of the magic she was working, and it was not a familiar spell but I blindly fumbled it around until it included me, and then we were moving alarmingly fast in the darkness.

I kindled a little light, hoping it would make everything seem less horrible. And then I remembered what was in the woods, and put it right back out again. “Pah,” she said, “you’ve wrecked my night vision. It’s good that I know this road so well.”

“I,” I said, “this is insane.”

“It’s perfectly safe,” she said, “if you’re with me. I dare say you’d be fine on your own too, though I don’t know how drunk you are.”

“I don’t know either,” I admitted. She darted a look at me, and it was a dangerously glinting sort of mischievous look, and I stumbled in my distraction. She laughed, and hauled me up, and I tried and failed not to laugh at the ludicrousness of it all. 

“Has the Spindle given you any trouble?” she asked, when we had our breath. We were moving in blurry steps that were more of a skip, and actually seemed to be quite long jumps really, and it was dizzying if you paid attention, so I was trying not to. 

“The,” I said, and then mentally caught up. “Oh. The water.” I paused, considering. “A bit,” I admitted, finally. 

“I was expecting you to stay away until the effect faded,” she said, less cheerfully. 

“Oh,” I said. She hadn’t wanted me to, surely. “I thought about it, but it would probably be three or five years, at least. And that beer I just drank was probably all brewed with Spindle water, wasn’t it.”

She glanced over at me in alarm. “Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to-- to trap you!”

“If I were concerned,” I said, “I wouldn’t-- why do you think I never ate or drank in your villages, before this?”

We were deep in the Wood now, and I was fighting back my urge to be vigilant. I caught a blurry glimpse of-- “Walker,” I said tersely.

“Oh,” she said, “they’re not dangerous, now, mostly.” And suddenly the charm dissolved, and I stumbled behind her as our pace became a normal walking pace again. I pressed myself against her side, preparing to throw a light-spell and dazzle anything that came out of the dark wood pressing around us. “They help me. I work with them, to find corrupted trees. I’ll show you, tomorrow, when it’s light.”

I didn’t see a walker now; we must have left it behind, but it wouldn’t be far. “I can’t believe I’m in the Wood, at night,” I muttered.

“Do try to control yourself,” she said, amused, and gestured a soft little light-spell into existence. There was a great oak tree ahead of us, and it took me a moment to recognize that the tree had a hollow in it, with a door. To one side, there was a rack filled with firewood. To the other, there was a stump with a basket on it. She walked up to it and tipped the fruit from the basket she was carrying into it. “I leave that basket for the walkers, and they come and take fruit. It’s one of the ways I’ve taught them to trust me.”

“They come up to your door,” I said, staring at it. She’d let go of my hand, to tip the basket, and she turned back now to catch at my hand again. 

“They do,” she said, smiling, and I was almost dazed by it; I stepped in closer, holding her hand, and brought my other hand up to her face, but stopped short, uncertain. 

Her smile faded a little, looking up at me, and there was a moment, during which I probably ought to have said something, but I couldn’t think of what. After a moment she stepped backward a little, tugging me toward the door. “Come in,” she said, softly.

She wasn’t entirely incautious; the light preceded us through the door, and she looked before she stepped in. I followed, carefully, craning my head to look around. It was a tiny cottage, all one room, with a hearth against the wall, a little table in front of it, a chair, some shelves, and a bed. It had a packed dirt floor, with a braided grass rug and a coverlet on the bed that looked like it was grown rather than woven. It didn’t look like a place a human lived. And it wasn’t; it was all held together with little enchantments. It was a fairytale witch’s cottage. The fire was already burning in the hearth, brought up by a charm as she came in, and the room was rapidly warming to our presence.

The door shut behind me, and I looked around. The ceiling was low; if I were tall, I would have had to duck, but I wasn’t so much bigger than Agnieszka herself was. I didn’t fit here, not really, but at least I could physically exist in the space. 

“Isn’t it cozy?” she said. 

“It is, that,” I said, and took another step into the room. I found myself smiling at it: such an improbable and charming little space. Just as its maker was improbable and charming. “It suits you.”

“I didn’t make it,” she said, “so much as… confirm it, more or less. Like it was already there waiting for me to uncover it.”

I smiled a little wider. “Those are the best kinds of workings,” I said. 

She tilted a look up at me, almost coy. “I didn’t think you went on instinct, much,” she said.

“I-- no,” I said, “but sometimes things just fall into place.” She’d stepped in a little closer, and I lost the thread of our conversation, and finally said, “I want very badly to kiss you and I can’t tell if you would want--”

She leaned up then and took my mouth with hers, wrapping her hands around the back of my neck, and I put one arm around her body and cradled her jaw in my other hand, and kissed her as deeply as I could manage, as if I could communicate to her through the intensity of it just how much I’d missed her. 

When I finally came up for air I was dizzy, and I could feel her heartbeat hammering in her throat against my hand. “Agnieszka,” I said, breathless. 

She had her eyes closed, and opened them slowly, blinking as if she were dazed. “Sarkan,” she whispered. 

“It’s not the Spindle I came back for,” I said. “It’s not the river that’s bound me.”

She blinked at me again, steadying herself with a hand against my chest. “I didn’t-- I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said. 

I had to kiss her again, but sweeter this time. “No,” I murmured, amused, “I’m sure you can’t help it.” 

“Come to my bed,” she said, leaning against me. 

I let her push me backward across the floor, and used a little charm to unfasten the laces of her bodice as we went. For her part, she undid all my fastenings with a gesture, all of them, and pushed my garments off, even the boots, as I sat on the bed. It was, in fact, moss, which felt very strange under naked skin, but the distraction couldn’t keep me for long. She was standing next to the bed, taller than me now that I was sitting, and I undressed her by hand, untying the waist of her skirt so it fell, and then pulling her shift up with my hands, caressing her skin after it. 

“I am far too old for you,” I said, “and foolish besides, and I had resolved to stay away and let you find yourself a more suitable lover, but Agnieszka, I am neither that kind nor that wise.”

“I don’t want any other lover,” she said, squirming in ticklish impatience as I pulled her shift up, over her breasts, and she had to step back a little so I could pull it over her head. She was naked, now, and I dropped her shift and pulled her closer against me, kissing her breasts, sliding the skin of my knees and then inner thighs against the sides of her legs, caressing her with my hands. She was still all limbs, but she had filled out a little with muscle since I’d last touched her; she wasn’t so gawky and adolescent now. 

She put up with the kissing for a few moments, and then she pushed me over onto my back and climbed into the bed with me. I rolled off the coverlet so she could get under the blankets, and then we were pressed up against one another, skin to skin. She slid her palm across my belly and suddenly paused, pulling her mouth away from mine.

“What’s this?” she asked, and turned down the cover to look at-- ah, the scar on my belly, from the run-in with the cursed boar-pike. 

“It’s fine,” I said, “it’s healed now.”

“What happened?” she demanded.

“There was a magical trap in the palace,” I said. “I disarmed it, but only after I set it off. It was when I was recovering from this that I tried to reach you through the illusion.”

“That’s a massive scar,” she said.

“It’s not worse than the one from the burning,” I said. That was the surest sign of my age, really-- all the scars. I had quite a collection by now. I took her hand, and pulled it away from the scar. “I told you I was busy there,” I said, and caught her mouth again. 

She moaned and shivered a little as I pressed myself against her. I was too overwhelmed with my need to touch her, at first, to be strategic; it was all just hands and skin and mouths, for a moment, but then I recollected myself enough to come up with a basic plan instead of just blindly pressing all of myself against all of her.  _ I don’t want any other lover _ , she’d said, which was more than I’d feared and more than I’d hoped for.

I put my hand between her thighs and my mouth on her breasts, which got her to writhe and shiver and go still and pliant, hands on my back. In a moment she found the scar that matched the one on the front; the boar-pike had found its way through, but it had missed the spine, so I hadn’t died and had managed to unpick the spell on it, with the thing pinning me to the wall and trying to tear its way out to seek the weakened Alosha as she lay next to me desperately trying to weave in the frayed ends of her magic to help me. It hadn’t been a pleasant few minutes. 

She traced the scar, shivering, and said, “You lived, at least.”

“I did,” I said, and smiled at her, then moved my mouth down her body.

“Where are you--” she said, and then I pressed my face between her thighs and she made a wordless, fervent noise and threw her head back. “Sarkan!” 

I set to work delightedly, pressing her open with my tongue and then going to work with my fingers as well, and she put her hands in my hair and made an escalating series of fantastic little exclamations, culminating in breathlessly losing her capacity for speech altogether as she shuddered and shook.

I eased up, riding out the tremors, until she had gone mostly still, panting and gasping, and then I put my tongue against her again and she shivered, grabbed my hair, and pulled. 

“Come here,” she panted, “Sarkan, come--”

I resisted the pressure on my scalp for just a moment, then let her pull me up. “If I were worried about the river water,” I said, wiping my face, and she laughed and pretended to hit me. But it was the truth-- there was a great deal of power in this, and I should have anticipated that. I had no need ready to hand for a spell, so I offhandedly used it to make another layer of protection spells around the house, around us, and had a half-formed thought of trying something more elaborate some other time. But for now I had no more attention to spare, because she was pulling me down to her. I was so hard it hurt, and I had to draw on every ounce of self-control I possessed to keep myself together long enough to do her justice. She wrapped her arms and legs around me and groaned as I sank into her. 

“Agnieszka,” I breathed fervently. 

She sucked in a shivery breath and rolled her hips against me, and I had to move, rolling with her and against her, and just like the last time I had faint notions of trying to make sure it was good for her but she seemed to already know what she needed, settling herself so that I moved inside her just right. She was watching my face, grinning up at me in shivery unmistakable delight, her hands curled around the back of my neck and my shoulder. I was already on the edge of losing control of myself, no gentleness governing me, no thought; I was nothing but instinct now, and her thighs around my waist guided me and her hands on my back goaded me and she arched her back, pulling me in deeper and harder. 

She cried out, shuddering, her body clenching around me, and it sent me into a kind of frenzy, driving into her in breathless desperation. She stuttered out my name, and I held on a moment longer and then skittered over the edge into release, losing myself in her. 

She closed up around me and pulled me down to her, arms and legs wrapped around me, my face in the crook of her neck and both our bodies still twitching and shivering, hearts pounding separately but in echo. I had no further attention to spare for over-thinking and fruitless planning, but surrendered to her and just lay there, thinking of nothing, pressed against her and still inside her, completely overthrown.

How long we lay like that I don’t know; it was a blissful, blank kind of existence, both fleeting and eternal, and too soon she was collecting herself with a deeper breath and taking me by the jaw to kiss me.

“Sarkan,” she said, soft but insistent, “Sarkan,” and when she said it, it was a true name, resonating right down through my bones to the center of me where my magic originated. 

I groaned, and kissed her, finally returning to myself enough to realize I was probably putting uncomfortable pressure on her lungs. I rolled off a little to one side, uncoupling with a soft wet slide that made me gasp and her shiver. It reminded me to raise my head and check in with her; she’d seemed to be doing just fine but I was an old man and she was barely out of girlhood and I’d not been the slightest bit gentle. 

I freed a hand to push some of her hair out of her face, and said, “What,” which wasn’t at all what I’d meant. 

She smiled at me, sweet and fond, and ran her thumb down the side of my face, next to my mouth. I was helpless to do anything but stare at her, completely drained of self-possession. “I’m glad you came back,” she murmured, and I let my head sink back down into her shoulder, warm lassitude washing over me. 

I didn’t know what the future held, I couldn’t imagine how I was going to figure out what to do about any of it, I was still aware somewhere in the back of my mind that I was in the Wood in the middle of the night, but somehow none of that seemed like it would be any great difficulty; my arms were around Agnieszka, and hers were around me, and we could probably figure the rest out between the two of us. I slid off into sleep, not at all worried for the first time in approximately a century.

**Author's Note:**

> Hilariously, I wrote 18,000 words and this was the only segment that was usable. I had a terrible mental block about writing the sex scene that was the entire point of this, and had to write frantically in circles first. (And I was only writing this because I was blocked on something else, so I suppose that makes some sense.)  
> At any rate, it seems to have worked itself out.  
> I had wanted to get a little bit kinkier (please, don't you think Sarkan would make a really sweet little sub who just likes to get his hair petted sometimes?) but it was not to be. This is what I got. It took me long enough. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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